As I indicated at the end of the recent post about surface tension, I've started a new thread about the amazing properties of water. This time I'll write about saturation, what it is and what it isn't. The reason I included the bit about "what it isn't" is that a close friend once asked what saturation actually was - they thought that if the air were "saturated" it was like walking through a swimming pool. Not an unreasonable deduction based on our everyday meaning of "saturation".

Water is an amazing substance. It has many properties that have a big impact on our lives and, I think, are quite useful for us to know about. One of these is the property of surface tension, which water shares with other less prevalent liquids. So what is surface tension? Wikipedia describes it as being caused by "the attraction between the liquid's molecules" which acts at the surface of the liquid to "diminish the surface area".